A dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now.
Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?
At that point, it'll be the opposite problem as more capacity than demand will be available. These new fabs won't be able to pay for themselves. Every tic receives a tok.
According to my research, these machines can etch around 150 wafers per hour and each wafer can fit around 50 top-of-the-line GPUs. This means we can produce around 7500 AI chips per hour. Sell them for $1k a piece. That's $7.5 million per hour in revenue. Run the thing for 3 days and we recover costs.
I'm sure there's more involved but that sounds like a pretty good ROI to me.
Rent a warehouse in one of the non Han dominated areas of China, where you can use all you want from the city's drinking water supply and pump all your used chemicals into the nearby river. Make sure to totally automate your robotic production line so you don't need to employ any locals.
The catch is if you started today with plenty of money (billions of dollars!) and could hire the right experts as you need them (this is a big if!) there would still be a couple years between today and producing 150 wafers per house. So the question isn't what does the math look like today, it is what the math looks like in 2 years - if you could answer that why didn't you start two years ago so you could get the current prices?
A photolithography machine doesn't etch anything (well, some EUV machines do it as an unwanted side effect because of plasma generation), it just patterns some resist material. Etching is happening elsewhere. Also, keep in mind, you'll need to do multiple passes through a photolithography machine to pattern different steps of the process - it's not a single pass thing.
Especially when the plan is to just run them in a random rented commercial warehouse.
I drive by a large fab most days of the week. A few breweries I like are down the street from a few small boutique fabs. I got to play with some experimental fab equipment in college. These aren't just some quickly thrown together spaces in any random warehouse.
And it's also ignoring the water manufacturing process, and having the right supply chain to receive and handle these ultra clean discs without introducing lots of gunk into your space.
Yeah good point, the clean room aspect of it is vital - when you're fabricating at the nano scale, a single speck of dust is a giant boulder ruining your lithography.
Keep in mind that every wafer makes multiple trips around the fab, and on each trip it visits multiple machines. Broadly, one trip lays down one layer, and you may need 80-100 layers (although I guess DRAM will be fewer). Each layer must be aligned to nanometer precision with previous layers, otherwise the wafer is junk.
Then as others have said, once you finish the wafer, you still need to slice it, test the dies, and then package them.
Plus all the other stuff....
You'll need billions in investment, not millions - good luck!
Would you really need ASML machines to do DDR5 RAM? Honest question, but I figured there was competition for the non-bleeding edge - perhaps naively so.
As someone who knows next to nothing about this space, why can China not build their own machines? Is ASML the only company making those machines? If so, why? Is it a matter of patents, or is the knowledge required for this so specialized only they've built it up?
They can - if they are willing to invest a a lot of money over several years. The US got Nuclear bombs in a few years during WWII with this thinking, and China (or anyone else) could too. This problem might be harder than a bomb, but the point remains, all it takes is a willingness to invest.
Of course the problem is we don't see what would be missed by doing this investment. If you put extra people into solving this problem that means less people curing cancer or whatever. (China has a lot of people, but not unlimited)
Designing such an advanced lithography machine is probably a Manhattan Project scale task. China is indeed trying to make progress and they will probably get there someday but for now ASML is the only company in the world that knows how to build these or anything remotely close.
Right, the most famous example is Zeiss which is the only company in the world that builds the high-precision mirrors needed for the most advanced ASML machines. I’m not sure if those are subject to export bans too, but even if they are, I think China could eventually figure out how to build them. It’s just a matter of a huge amount of R&D that would need to be done first.
Yes. ASML is the only company making these machines. And both, they own thousands of patents and are also the only ones with the institutional knowledge required to build them anyway.
You need to sell the artisanal DRAM to HiFi hucksters. Get Monster Cable on board to say their cables can only reach peak warmth, punch, and clarity - when using gear with artisanal DRAM. You'll easily sell into that market at $10k per GB...
This existed and it was called LOL memory (little old lady memory). It was knitted by little old ladies, being careful of which wires passed through which cores of course. It was ROM, not RAM.
I can't invest, your company doesn't have "AI" in the name and your business plan doesn't seem to involve shoving unwanted chatbots down everyone's throats at all. That's no way to run a modern business!
You're just talking about a lithography machine. Patterning is one step out of thousands in a modern process (albeit an important one). There's plenty more stuff needed for a production line, this isn't a 3D printer but for chips. And that's just for the FEOL stuff, then you still need to do BEOL :). And packaging. And testing (accelerated/environmental, too). And failure analysis. And...
Also, you know, there's a whole process you'll need to develop. So prepare to be not making money (but spending tons of it on running the lines) until you have a well tested PDK.
Canon has been working on an alternative to EUV lithography called nanoimprint lithography. It would be a bit closer to the idea of having an inkjet printer make the masks to etch the wafers. It hasn't been proven in scale and there's a lot of thinking this won't really be useful, but it's neat to see and maybe the detractors are wrong.
They'll still probably require a good bit of operator and designer knowledge to work around whatever rough edges exist in the technology to keep yields high, assuming it works. It's still not a "plug it in, feed it blank wafers, press PRINT, and out comes finished chips!" kind of machine some here seem to think exist.
I think you are vastly underestimating how a modern fab works. The average cost is 10 billion and takes a about 10 years to build. They are very complex and even the slightest issue can ruin yields. There is a reason why there are so few.
